All in all, pretty scary that this is still possible today. Eerie too how it was exactly 30 months after the WTC buildings collapsing. Doesn't say much however...

I called the one person I know in Madrid to check if she was alright. She was.

Today in the building where we work (which is Barcelona's own WTC), there was a fifteen minute silence gathering outside on the square. Seeing more than a thousand adults trying to be quiet for fifteen minutes makes you think.

There's not much I can say - my heart is with all those people who were there.

Mach

Released a new version yesterday, with a bunch of nice fixes for a lot of issues. Already put in two new fixes today. One was a bug report from Matthias from last night; the other was to add --promoteepoch when supported so that with the recent epoch changes, it's again possible to build packages that were unable to install their deps due to this.

Am now thinking of splitting up the distro files, and after that it's time to start thinking about a reworking with everything abstracted nicely into classes.

GStreamer

Everything is getting pretty much ready for the 0.8.0 release on Monday. Tweaked the packaging some more, sent out a mail to interested packagers about how we would like to see it packaged. Decided to drop the gstreamer08 set of packages obsoleting the 07 ones, since apt didn't handle it nicely.

Decided not to implement release-device, even though I think Benjamin is wrong about the importance of the bug or the way he chooses to express his opinion :) But OTOH, I think it's bad for our internal community if I keep complaining about stuff I think is important on behalf of other people who for some reason don't really take part in the discussion. Even though they're our primary users. I need to figure out first how I can make the community around GStreamer a bit more vocal.

I think I found the correct way to do gst-ffmpeg, so that we can be a good community player and send patches upstream where it makes sense, but also make it perfectly easy for users to build it from CVS. I think I found the right mix of procedures to do this correctly. Let's see how it goes; if it turns out well, I can write something up about it as a general solution to the "how to pull in other people's CVS and use it in a project" problem.

Open Carpet

I'd like to have some of the big repos use Open Carpet themselves, instead of the completely crack umbrella repository set up at the OC site. It's completely wrong to make people believe that all these repositories can be freely mixed :)

Anyway, since all these people build their packages themselves, not having the sources readily available to all the red carpet components is kind of a problem. What's more, I tried to convince snorp that this really is an issue, but for some reason he thinks it's not a problem and "they should just use build-buddy to build the packages". Apparently he doesn't understand what these guys' life mission is...

Anyway, buildbuddy is nice, but solves a completely different problem. It's aimed at "how can I make packages for all different distros from one control file". Unsurprisingly, it generates very ugly spec files. The repos out there are, at the most, concerned with getting it to run on only Red Hat/Fedora. Some of them even explicitly limit themselves to a subset of this. And they want clean spec files. And src.rpms that can be rebuilt without problems on the target platform. Something that's very much not possible with the red-carpet stuff.

So, I'm going to take a stab at trying to figure out how to do it correctly. To warm up,
I made ximian-artwork rpms, where I actually use their .src.rpm as the Source: in the spec file. Neat trick. Probably be necessary for the red-carpet components too.

I was really happy to have Industrial again, it's so much prettier than Bluecurve. I had missed it ever since moving from my RH9 install to Fedora Core 1. For some reason metacity failed to change the window decorations though, which a quick metacity-message restart fixed.

Going home

Coming to work on blades is starting to work out fine. Going back home is slightly harder since there is no easy bladable route going home. I guess I'll have to do some searching.